I am grateful for generous research funding from the European Research Council, which has allowed me to push my research agenda forward. Since 2018, I have received:

  • ERC Advanced Grant (2025-2030) for my project ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION
  • ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2024-2025) for my project NextENERGEIA
  • ERC Consolidator Grant (2018-2024) for my project ELECTRIC_CHALLENGES

More information can be found at EnergyEcoLab.

ERC ADVANCED Grant (2025-2030)

Socio-Economic Challenges and Opportunities

of the Energy Transition

(ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION)

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will push the frontier in energy and environmental economics by addressing and quantifying novel socio-economic challenges and opportunities that arise as the Energy Transition moves forward

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will pioneer the research on the re-design of electricity markets, and the regulation for Green Hydrogen

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will delve into the distributional impacts of Energy Transition policies, providing novel evidence on the local effects and solutions for avoiding the potentially regressive effects of climate policies

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will develop new theoretical models to assess Energy Transition policies, which will provide a rigorous structure for the empirical analyses of these issues

ENERGY-IN-TRANSITION will provide sound guidance to highly relevant policy questions.

Primary research questions:

  1. How should Energy Transition’s policies be designed?

   – How should the current electricity market design be adapted to support renewable energy investments?

   – How should Green Hydrogen be regulated and its markets designed?

   – Do “transitional technologies” improve welfare?

  1. What are the distributional effects of the Energy Transition, and how can they be addressed?

   – What are the local effects of phasing out coal and phasing in renewable energies?

   – What explains local opposition to renewables, and how can it be curbed?

   – What are the distributional implications across households of different rooftop solar policies, and how have they influenced the regressive effects of the energy crisis?

Methodology:

The project will employ a combination of theoretical, empirical, and simulation tools:

– Development of new theoretical models, e.g., on electricity market contracting incorporating counterparty risk; and on investment and production decisions of green hydrogen producers.

– Use of traditional econometrics for causal inference and state-of-the-art machine learning methods to construct counterfactual scenarios.

– Design of simulation tools to assess the interplay between different regulatory tools (e.g., regarding green hydrogen regulation) and electricity market outcomes.

Contribution:

The project will provide:

– Groundbreaking research on electricity market design and green hydrogen regulation.

– Methodological advancements in policy design and evaluation.

– Insights into the local and distributional effects of energy policies and potential solutions to address them.

– Practical policy recommendations for policymakers to assess and refine energy and environmental policies.

Team

I will count with the support of a team of other first-class economists. Notably, I will be working side by side with my current co-authors Gerard Llobet (cemfi), Juan Pablo Montero (PUC-Chile), Mar Reguant (Northwestern and UAB), Imelda (Geneva Graduate Institute), Mateus Souza (Mannheim), David Andrés-Cerezo (UAB), Roberto Ramos and Eduardo Gutiérrez (Bank of Spain). I will also start new collaborations with Stanley Reynolds (Arizona), Thomas Douenne (Amsterdam University) and Juan Palacios (Maastricht University and MIT). I will also work closely with the new predocs, postdocs and PhD students who will join EnergyEcoLab thanks to the project’s funding.

The project will also involve extensive collaboration with international researchers and institutions, leveraging a network of experts to ensure a high-impact, multidisciplinary approach.

ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2024-2025)

Simulating the effects of low-carbon investments in electricity markets

(NextENERGEIA)

The ERC Proof of Concept project “NextENERGEIA” aims to develop an innovative software tool to simulate the impact of low-carbon investments on electricity markets. The primary research question focuses on how renewable energies, green hydrogen production, energy storage, and electric vehicles will affect electricity prices and market dynamics. The project seeks to provide both social and private perspectives on the value of these investments, offering valuable insights for regulators, policymakers, energy firms, and consumers.

Leveraging advanced game-theoretical models and state-of-the-art numerical methods, the enhanced new module of the ENERGEIA software will enable detailed simulations of electricity market outcomes where low carbon assets operate, allowing to model the close interaction between the operation of these assets and the performance of electricity markets. The project promises to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical policy-making, providing robust, quantitative analyses to inform energy market reforms and support the energy transition at least cost for society.

ERC CONSOLIDATOR Grant (2018-2024)

Current Tools and Policy Challenges in Electricity Markets

(ELECTRIC_CHALLENGES)

Main research question:

ELECTRIC_CHALLENGES proposes to carrying out policy-relevant research on a pressing issue: how to design optimal regulatory and market-based solutions to achieve the low-carbon transition at least cost.

Main research topics:

The European experience provides unique natural experiments with which to test some of the most contentious policy issues that arise in the context of electricity markets. These include the potential to change households’ electricity demand patterns through dynamic pricing, the scope for renewables to mitigate market power and depress wholesale market prices, and the design and performance of the contracts and auctions for renewable support.

Methodology:

I will rely on cutting-edge theoretical, empirical, and simulation tools to disentangle these topics, while at the same time providing key economic insights that are relevant beyond electricity markets. On the theory front, I propose to develop new models that incorporate the unpredictability of renewables to characterize strategic behavior and optimal bidding in these markets. This is a key, yet broadly omitted ingredient in previous analyses. In turn, my models will provide structure and testable predictions for my empirical and simulation analyses, for which I will rely both on traditional econometrics for causal inference as well as on state-of-the-art machine learning methods to construct counterfactual scenarios.

Contribution:

As a source of rich and highly disaggregated data, electricity markets open up exciting opportunities to explore issues that, while being of general interest, cannot be studied in other sectors in such a great detail. My research will also provide methodological contributions for other areas – particularly those related to policy design and policy evaluation. The aim is to provide sound policy answers through the lens of state-of-the-art methodologies.

The conclusions of this research should prove valuable for academics, as well as to policy makers to assess the impact of environmental and energy policies and redefine them where necessary.

Team:

I will count with the support of a team of other first-class economists. Notably, my current co-authors Gerard Llobet (cemfi), Juan Pablo Montero (PUC-Chile), Mar Reguant (Northwestern), and David Rapson (UC Davis), plus a team of predocs and post-docs hired under the project.

In this article at the EAERE magazine, I discuss some initial questions of the project.

Selected Project Publications: